These things will opine to happen as long as 1st level supervisors report to 2nd level ones. Those on the bottom don’t get paid to know what’s going on.
These things happen wherever there is bureaucracy. I’m currently coping with a mess over code violations that were sprung on me when a neighboring contractor clogged my rental property drain resulting in basement flooding in rental apartment, call by them to authorities and $6,000 in fines when they discovered safety violations caused by change in law a few years ago. So I filed photos showing correction of violations with law department. Finally, after 6 months they sent very bad black copies of my color copies to the regulatory department to ask if I had corrected violations. Regulatory dept. had made one efforts to get reinspection and one effort over a month later to talk with me, but I did not see either email in the vast clutter of emails I get regularly. So regulatory told law I failed.
Meanwhile, a week before Christmas I received an official letter that because of Covid distress, city would forgive fines if all violations had been shown corrected a few days after X-mas, to which I responded promptly with the same completely reconfigured email photos (10 hours stressful labor with me the IT nerd, and friend the IT expert and we got it in on Christmas Day. Unfortunately regulatory combined my personal address numbers with the subject property’s street name, so if the sent someone to inspect they went to the wrong place.
So now my case is back with law, but a very nice “help” person checked and found my original submission 6 months ago which contained clear color photos. They alerted the primary law office about the situation and existence of the clear photos, so I hope law decides to clear me and NOT send back to regulatory. Apparently, working from home, people are using their black and white computers to send photos rather than the color copy equipment at headquarters. I am very frustrated and worried because a similar thing happened to me 10 years ago.
I was putting a porch on the front of a building. I had put the permit in the basement window while planning and purchasing. Then I built the floor of the porch, but forgot to move the permit to the first floor window. Next, a $2,000 stop-work-order just before Christmas. I called inspector, sent him a copy of my permit and he said he would take care of it. He did not, resulting in about 10 hours of discussions with various offices in law as they tried to collect the fine. Finally in June I was heard by and Administrative Law Judge who dismissed my case “with prejudice” when meant they could not do anything to me. That fall I went to regulatory to get a different permit and was told I still had a stop-work-order and could not get the permit. I got carefully angry and in 1/2 hour the failure to notify the legal decision had been rectified and I finished getting the permit.
Lessons learned. Expect bureaucracies to fail. Document everything, forever. When going to a problem meeting bring everything. Never give up. I have only had one problem I actually needed a lawyer for. That was when I was being politically active against an issue favored by officials. My pro bono lawyer and I pursuaded the 3 person Hearing panel to throw out the city’s contention that I owed thousands of tax dollars, because I had ample documentation I had followed the law.